NAS using SATA and ATA disks

I have about 10 hard drives some SATA 2 and some ATA. I would like to build a NAS box where I can use all these disks and build a hugh NAS disk. All disks together sums about 3 TB. I know that combining ATA and SATA will reduce the speed, but I don't care.

My idea is NOT having a computer on the network with a bunch of disks. My idea was to have a box where I can put all disks and that gives me the following (I don't know if this is possible, but here we go)...

ONE disk is seen on the network
the NAS is a kind of RAID-0, i.e., everything stored there is mirrored.
if a drive fails, I don't lose anything.
it sleeps when not being accessed and wakes up by lan.
it uses ethernet and if possible has wifi too.

is there a product that matches this? If not, can it be built from scratch?

SpaceDog

Posted 2010-09-07T13:23:57.700

Reputation: 1 318

Answers

Your best bet is really building an OpenSolaris box, ZFS really shines for this kind of application. You can build one Raid-Z array out of all your disks, ZFS will do CRC checks on all disk blocks for you, you can export the disks as SMB shares or NFS mounts or iSCSI blocks.

The built-in volume manager will let you take filesystem snapshots for backup purposes or to move them to another ZFS host, and if you have an SSD you can put it to good use for the ZFS intent log - meaning that suddenly all your data access will be as quick as the SSD.

This meets four out of your five requirements, and I wouldn't be surprised if you can manage somehow to make the thing sleep and wake up via WOL.

Carlos Bailongo

Posted 2010-09-07T13:23:57.700

Reputation: 36

Thanks all you guys but @Carlos solution is closer to what I need. – SpaceDog – 2010-09-07T20:45:33.927

I've toyed with FreeNAS in the past. It'd probably be worth ruling out if nothing else. It doesn't support all of what you are asking, but it comes close.

Matt

Posted 2010-09-07T13:23:57.700

Reputation: 396

I agree - building or using a spare machine and loading freenas is probably the best bet - never seen an off the shelf NAS unit supporting both Sata and ata – William Hilsum – 2010-09-07T13:38:06.477

Rack Nas...basically they cost about £6,000 and support pretty much any hard drive you can imagine. They are normally only ever used in Data centers for massive storage and they come default with upto 15 slots for hard drives.

Unfortauntely however there is no domestic NAS that can help you, as Matt and Wil say it may have to be a software solution which works from a computer on the network. The biggest NAS I have seen under £1000 is about 6 slot NAS which still would not hold your 10 HDD. My synology at home supports both ATA and SATA but I have never used ATA as I need to buy some kind of special adapter thing to plugin an ATA drive in.

Sammaye

Posted 2010-09-07T13:23:57.700

Reputation: 405